The invention relates to a parachute having a cap made of elongate, radially arranged cloth panels whose longitudinal sides are sewn together.
In this classical manner of parachute construction, the side edges of the cloth panels may be rounded, resulting in a spherical pattern, or they may form a train of polygons. In any case, however, the pattern of the cloth panels is symmetrical to a linear center axis. In many known parachutes, the cap is divided into a supporting zone and a guide zone which follows toward the bottom after the largest cap diameter. This guide zone may be comprised, for example, of individual guide faces which are inclined with respect to the axis of the parachute, it may be curved inwardly as a simple extension of the cap curvature, or it may have the shape of the generated surface of a cone frustum. It is known that the guide zone serves the purpose of imparting a stable descent behavior to the parachute and to attenuate pendulum oscillations of the parachute load system if there is a change in air flow (a sudden gust of wind).
It is also known to provide parachutes with openings from which the air escapes more or less tangentially so that during descent the parachute rotates about its axis. However, in all prior art designs of rotating parachutes, there exists the special problem of deflecting the exiting air into the tangential direction. To effect this, it is often necessary to employ pieces of cloth cut according to a particularly complicated pattern which are specially attached to the parachute itself to provide air guidance and constitute a considerable manufacturing cost factor.